we find our thinking thrown into confusion by a multitude of ideological currents and their propagandists. Just think of the thoughts you’ve recently had about Donald Trump! Was it really sensible to have had all of these? Isn’t it precisely one of the traps laid by Trump’s savvy media strategy that we spend so much time talking about the ever-swelling tide of scandals that engulf him?
As inhabitants of the infosphere – our digital environment – we are exposed to a relentless flood of information. This presents philosophy with new challenges. This book represents an attempt at sustained reflection on what thought really is, so that we might regain some form of control over the terrain currently occupied by the dubious magicians of Silicon Valley and their technophile adepts, who ostentatiously insist that they have created genuine artificial intelligence. We need to demystify and disenchant our gadgets and do away with the belief in their omnipotence. Otherwise, we condemn ourselves to a future as mere victims of digital transformation, hopeless info-junkies or brain-dead techno-zombies.
Notes
1 1. Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Logic, ed. and trans. J. Michael Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 537 (9:23).
2 2. Ibid.
3 3. Ibid.
4 4. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Terry P. Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 50 (§74); Paul Artin Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007).
Introduction
The human being is the animal that doesn’t want to be one. This is because, at some point or other, it began to wonder who or what it really is. Insofar as we have an implicit or explicit image of ourselves as human beings, we also make claims about the nature of the good life. Ethics* is the discipline that asks what a good life looks like. It is therefore based upon anthropology, the discipline tasked with figuring out what precisely distinguishes the human both from other animals and from the lifeless expanses of the inanimate universe.1
Our image of the human being is closely intertwined with our values. A moral value is a yardstick for human behaviour. It distinguishes between actions that ought to be performed – the good ones – and those that ought not to be carried out – the bad, morally deficient ones. Every value system should also have room for actions that, at least in most cases, are neither good nor bad (driving on the left-hand side of the road rather than the right-hand side, twiddling your thumbs, taking a deep breath, buttering bread, and so on), as well as for actions that are utterly unacceptable – that is, evil (torturing of children, for example, or poison gas attacks on civilian populations).
Not every morally wrong action is automatically evil, because not all morally wrong action causes far-reaching harm to the value system itself – think of those occasional white lies told to protect a friend or of cheating at a board game. Evil, by contrast, completely undermines the value system in which it arises. Thus, the prototypical sadistic totalitarian dictator, of which the previous century has provided us with all too many examples, subverts his own value system. Unable to trust anyone or anything, he has to create a total surveillance apparatus.
For as long as we remain mired in deep uncertainty as to who or what we are as human beings, we will not be able to calibrate our value systems properly. If the very nature of the human is in question, ethics too is at stake. This doesn’t mean, I hasten to point out, that other living beings (including plants) or even lifeless, inanimate matter are morally irrelevant – far from it. But, in order to determine what we owe both to ourselves and to the rest of the reality we affect, we have to ask ourselves the question of who we really are and, in the light of the truth of who we are, who we want to be in the future.2
Unfortunately, it is very difficult, impossible even, to determine who the human being is from a neutral standpoint. For it is necessarily a matter of self-determination to attempt to determine what the human actually is. This self-determination cannot simply consist in naming natural facts, because the human is a specifically minded animal, where human mindedness (or Geist, as we say in my neck of the woods) is the capacity to lead a life in the light of a representation of who the human being is. More concretely, this capacity finds expression whenever and wherever we develop stories and images of our lives and of the conditions under which we deem them a success. We thereby aim to be happy, but without being able to give anything like a universally valid account of what happiness is.
From a philosophical point of view, happiness designates nothing other than a successful life. There are no universally valid standards for this; neither is there a set of principles of which we might somehow draw up a definitive catalogue. At best, we can state the framework conditions that are valid for any successful pursuit of happiness – namely, human rights. Yet this does not mean that philosophy or any other discipline could come up with a recipe for happiness.
Today, however, the concept of the human being hangs in the balance. The digital age has already brought about a world in which what was previously the privilege of humans – that is, solving problems in an intelligent fashion – is now carried out, in a range of situations at least, with far greater speed and efficiency by the machines that we have built in order to make our life and survival less burdensome.
Ever since the initial flourishing of philosophical thought in Athens, where it developed simultaneously with the first democracy, one of its central tasks has been to point out confusions circulating in the marketplace of ideas. Today’s marketplace of ideas is the internet, the central medium of the digital age. The slogan of this book is: think first, digitalize second. This is just a version of Kant’s famous Enlightenment motto: ‘Have courage to use your own understanding!’, but tailored to our own times. This is an urgent necessity in an age in which global digital propaganda systems, with their continual bombardments of newsflashes and posts, hurl our thinking into turmoil and confusion.
The first key thesis of this book states that thought is a sense, just like our sense of hearing, touch and taste, our sense of balance, and everything else that we nowadays count as belonging to the human sensory system. This thesis runs counter to the now widespread idea that thinking is basically a matter of information processing and therefore a procedure which can essentially be re-created in silicon or some other non-living material. In short: computers ultimately think just as little as do the good old ring binders familiar from our analogue bureaucracy. Programs are simply systems of data management, which we can use to solve problems far quicker than we ever could without their help: booking flights, solving equations, translating foreign languages (more or less adequately), writing books or sending emails.
At the same time, I want to argue that our human intelligence is itself a case of artificial intelligence – indeed, the only real one we happen to be acquainted with. Human thought is not a natural process governed by the laws of nature, like the dynamics we find in the sun or in sandstorms. Unlike the moon’s orbiting of the Earth or the expansion of the solar system, we cannot understand our thinking if we abandon mentalistic vocabulary – i.e. language designed to articulate the meaning of thought – which typically includes words such as intelligence, thought, belief, hope, desire, intention and the rest.
The human being is the creature who is conscious of this very fact. And, accordingly, it orients its life around its ability to make targeted interventions into the conditions of its own life and survival. This is why humans elaborate sophisticated technologies in the form of systems for improving and simplifying their survival conditions. The human is thus networked with technology in its very self-understanding.
